


Snake In The Garden

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [57]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crossover, Codependency, Crossover, Gen, Grief, Issues of Guilt, Murder, PTSD and Dissociation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-30 09:58:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6419284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She and her brother were street rats to them, she a charity case, much as they had been to teachers and café-owners and any of the myriad others they had accepted aid from, taken shelter with. Distance, distance she could accept, but for all they seemed to want to help her grief it was not because it was grief, not ever.</p><p>It was because they thought it was wrong, and that it was their job.</p><p>Lecter did not seem to think like that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snake In The Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Hannibal Lecter as Wanda Maximoff's therapist: Discuss.

**i.  
** Wanda hates therapy. She hates therapists and their glaring _openness_ , their inability to keep her from their minds – they don’t even _try_ and it pains her, pains her to see them so open and obvious in _everything_. She hates psychiatrists and their obvious assessments, almost shouted in neon paint from the walls of their minds.

_(she remembers paint on the walls of Novi Grad, neon screams, railing against the false government)_

She has no anchor now, with Pietro gone—

_(gone gone, an aching loss she can feel waking or sleeping, like a limb lopped off)_

—and it is all too easy to slip from her mind to theirs, even without bright strands of her scarlet making it obvious. She can already see the turn of their thoughts, and more and more often she is finding herself watching closer and closer and closer until she spills out of her–

_(empty, aching)_

—mind and into theirs.

She wishes she wouldn’t, but she cannot seem to stop. She is unmoored without Pietro’s presence, drifting into the æther between her skull and those around her. Some are quiet minds, and there she may find peace for just a moment, in bleak white expanses, or cool clean blue, or deep dark browns and grey and blackness as deep as the void—

_(the void into which her brother fell)_

—and it is restful to do that. Other minds are strong, strong as beacons and catch her mind up into them, pull her along, and for just a moment she lets herself revel in the feeling of _not_ being herself, of _not_ being Wanda Maximoff, the twin without her counterbalancing half, of having something other to her life than the bone deep _pain_ that is the wound where once her brother was.

The minds of the psychiatrists—

_(therapists, sometimes)_

—are wide open to her, and hide so little it _pains_ her. It is easy to slip in without meaning, unmoored as she is, their minds glowing like the beacon of a lighthouse, as peaceful as any safe harbour—

 _(but not her brother’s not the perfect peace she could find there, in amongst all his speeding chaos, for there there lay_ **_purpose_** _, as driving a thing as anything, and as constant as the beating pulse of their blood)_

—and it is all too simple, all too easy to take information without meaning to, to know their judgements and assumptions, their beliefs of how she and Pietro were—

 _(close, yes, but not so close as so many seemed to think, and sending curls of grey-green-yellow disgust spiralling through their minds. Their assumptions based on misunderstandings and misinterpretations and it_ **_sickened_ ** _her, even more than it had to see her brother’s body)_

—and more than all that to know that she was nothing more than a job to them, the threat that could yet be a threat again, the lack of any true care in their minds for her wellbeing. She was an assignment and nothing more, and maybe she would have preferred that professionalism, if it had been matched by professionalism in their minds and in their assumptions.

None of them cared. None of them even seemed to be even vaguely interested beyond what was expected, none of them saw her loss, her pain, her grief and _sympathised_ , _empathised_ , _cared_.

She and her brother were street rats to them, she a charity case, much as they had been to teachers and café-owners and any of the myriad others they had accepted aid from, taken shelter with. Distance, distance she could accept, but for all they seemed to want to help her grief it was not because it was grief, not ever.

It was because they thought it was wrong, and that it was their job.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
The new therapist—

_(psychiatrist, maybe, but she doesn’t care for the particulars)_

—has a mind like a snake’s. His mind is coiled in place, where he is sat, ready and waiting, in the middle of the room. The light is softly filtered through deep reddish curtains, the chairs are soft and upholstered in a mixture of leather and velveteen, and it feels like a trap to Wanda, with the cold waiting watchfulness of this new man’s mind.

She sits, all the same, because this is the condition on which she is allowed to train, allowed to do something other than dwell on her brother’s death;—

 _(the death that haunts her, night and day, always behind her lids, the flickering blue light of her brother’s mind, flickering and flickering and_ **_gone_ ** _)_

—she must accept some form of therapy for it. The man opposite her sits quietly, watching her simply, observing with the same eerie quietness of his mind. He does not look like a snake at all, except some odd flatness in his eyes—

_(blue, she thinks, and then the red light from the curtains catches them and she thinks: maroon)_

—and the planes of his face remind her of some she had seen in Sokovia and rarely saw now she was here in America.

_(continental tilts and angles, she thinks; ones like home)_

“Hello,” he says. His voice is soft, with a touch of an accent both unfamiliar and familiar, similar but not quite to ones she had heard on the streets of Sokovia. “I am Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
Hannibal is almost certain he can feel the pain radiating off the woman sitting before him. He does not have the gift for empathy that Agent Graham, liaison to the Avengers, does, but he knows that Wanda Maximoff is a telepath of some stripe, and knows that she has lost her brother, her twin.

_(he remembers losing Mischa and all the anger and pain that has caused him since, until he learned to swim through the dark ocean of it and build his mind palace above its deep well)_

The girl curls small on the chair, boots kicked off, stockinged feet tucked under herself. Her hands pick at the skirt of her dress, and she doesn’t seem to look at him, just hide behind her hair. It is a slight rudeness, he supposes, for her to kick her boots off so, to not meet his gaze or greet him back, but he can forgive it, just now, with her pain almost palpable in the air, even now, a month after the battle and her loss.

There is a very very slight shake to her fingers, picking over the cloth, and Hannibal lets his interest grow.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Wanda nods her head slightly, a soft inclining, and rising to meet his gaze.

_(manners, she remembers; he hasn’t started to push yet)_

“What would you like to speak of, Wanda?”

Wanda cannot help how her brows rise at that. The other therapists, psychiatrists, all asked her to define her problem to them, but they did not understand when it came to expressing the grief she feels for her brother. They assumed things that were not, or misunderstood, because she did not have the words in _Sokovian_ let alone in English to explain what it was like to feel half of your soul, your very self, be ripped from you.

_(pain, she remembers. Pain like nothing else, like pinching, burning, hooks through skin, the burning virus and blue energy that gave them their powers, the rasping breaths for those two days buried beneath rubble, and the bullets, oh the bullets, that she could feel in her brother’s body as though it was her own, aching with every breath, burning with every moment)_

“Nothing,” she says, and sees the interest pique in the man’s eyes, bloom fully in the vines wrapped around the serpent of his mind. “I do not want to be here.”

There is a very odd smile playing around the edges of the man’s thin-lipped mouth—

_(like List and Strucker’s, the lying smile of someone untrustworthy, but there is a certainty to this serpent, one she cannot deny, one that coils its way into her mind even as she searches out the knots of its own coiling)_

—and he inclines his head slightly, a mirror of her earlier nod. “That as may be,” he says, and Wanda cannot help but find the familiar-unfamiliar lilt almost comforting. “But you are sent to me for a reason. It would be a terrible thing to get nothing out of it.”

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
Nothing much happens, that first session. Hannibal—

_(“you may call me that, Wanda, if you wish”)_

—had gently teased things from her, things which worried her in the now—

_(“I do not think they will let me train if they realise I do it only to not think of my brother”)_

—and things she missed, things which hurt her—

_(“I trip sometimes, because I expect his hand there and it is not. I do not know how to be one, not two”)_

—and many other small things. Insignificant things, Wanda thought, until she saw the vines, thorny and flowered, growing and blooming further around the serpent, and the serpent wrapping itself still more firmly in them all the same, even as the thorns cut its adder-patterned skin to shreds.

There is _interest_ there, she can sense it, true and genuine, and almost _intense_.

 _(she does not fear intense. Her pain is intense, Pietro’s protection of her was intense, the loss of their parents was intense. Her life has been_ **_intense_ ** _for as long as she can remember)_

It is enough to make her consider going back, that he has not insisted she talk about her _problem_ , has not insisted she talk of her brother, had only asked it of her that she _talk_ , and try to make something of the session rather than nothing at all.

The snake of his mind had watched through all of it, and sometimes, when she could feel the tears beading in her eyes, it flicked out its tongue and _tasted_.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
“Sometimes I want to hate him for dying,” Wanda whispers one day. “But I cannot; it would be like hating myself.”

Hannibal rests his hands together, folds his interlocked fingers on his knee, and seems to consider. The snake of his mind, ever present, ever awake, seems alert now, watching, but it is an honest interest, not like the bland openness of the others’ minds. “But you did not die,” he points out. “Or do you mean that you wish you could have followed?”

Wanda considers. Weighs each option in her mind—

_(what there is that remains; the cathedral façade was blasted to dust by her grief, and the synagogue beneath has fared no better. It is barely a frame, now, against wild woods, over a wilder ocean, and it is easier to let herself drift on winds, into other’s minds and out of her own)_

—and shrugs softly. She is wrapped in her red shawl today and the fringe shifts how it trails over her tucked-up legs with the movement, like spider’s feet.

“Do not know,” she says eventually. “Pietro and I… we were one and the same in many things, but ourselves when- _where_ it mattered. He would have followed me but… he had put too much of himself into preserving me for me to follow him. It would have been wrong.” She pauses, gives the softest of bitter laughs. “It would have been _rude_.”

Across the small expanse of carpet Hannibal nods, blue eyes catching red light from the curtains and flashing maroon again—

_(like a devil in it, Wanda thinks sometimes. Innocent as anything in so much, but light showing truth. She wonders, briefly, if that is why he keeps the curtains pulled shut so often)_

—before his fingers tap gently over his knee.

“And if there is anything you and your brother never were to each other,” he says. “It was rude.”

Wanda nods, tangles her fingers in the fringe of her shawl. “We were of the same,” she says. “It would have been rude to ourselves to. And then… when we gained our gifts we were fully of the same. It let us share our minds as we had always shared ideas.” Her hands rise, flicker briefly with scarlet darting from one to the other. “Instant.”

“Ah,” Hannibal says, softly, oh so softly. His head tilts back, and Wanda can see the pulse at his neck, his Adam’s apple, the soft light somehow bright enough to shine on his hair. “So you were in his mind as he died. I cannot imagine how that felt.”

 _(he cannot, Wanda can see that. He cannot imagine what it is to feel a part of yourself ripped away like that, but the snake of his mind is flicking its tongue out, tasting, and she can see that he_ **_wants_ ** _to know, in the same way he is genuinely interested by her, a true curiosity, not for pay, not for a job, but because it does, on some true deep level,_ **_fascinate_ ** _him. It is almost like caring, and Wanda can feel his curiosity coiling through her mind like a serpent)_

“Agony,” she says. “Burning, starving, aching, bleeding. All of that, and more and worse. I was... was being torn, to little pieces. Between my body and Pietro’s mind.”

“Like wild horses,” Hannibal says. “It used to be a punishment, to tear someone apart between four wild horses.”

Wanda watches him, but there is nothing in his expression – even in his mind – but honesty.

“I believe,” he says, “it was usually a punishment for treason.”

Wanda’s eyes pick their way over the pattern of the carpet, some series of interlocking knots and twists and plaits and coils. The breath that is pushed out of her nose is accompanied by the slightest downturn of her mouth. “Is it treason to want dead the man who killed your parents?”

“That depends,” Hannibal says. “Who is the man?”

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
There is a patience to Hannibal Lecter, Wanda learns, a patience as great as her own, in waiting for vengeance, a patience as abiding, as lasting, as driven as Pietro could be. He was patient for that which interested him, for that which intrigued him,—

_(“it is quite fascinating,” he had said to her one session. “your scarlet. Do you ever wonder why it is that colour?”_

_“it is blood,” Wanda had said and shrugged. “has always been my colour”._

_He had_ **_hmm’d_ ** _at that, softly, unquestioningly curious, and had set it aside)_

—for that which seemed to matter to him.

_(“I would like to see a report of your training,” he had said when she was leaving one day. “And-” he had raised a finger, almost a reproving parent, “-I should not like to have to go to the Captain for it.”)_

It baffled Wanda slightly, that another would care so, but at the same time it was obvious, the complex Celtic knots of the serpent of his mind, the tasting tongue stretching out each time she spoke of Pietro… it made it easier to speak, to see his interest, to see the thorny vines around the serpent of his mind bloom brighter, stronger, and for the adder-snake to knot itself still more around the interest even as it cut itself to bleeding.

The snake of his mind is a dangerous thing, she knows, but it forms in an ordered peace, and drifting as she is she cannot help but find the peace helpful, the system of thought soothing.

_(in the gaps between sessions she decides to remake her mind in a model of his, stripped as it is of cathedral and synagogue and even the most basic foundations. She strips the forest bare and builds a library from the ashes of her mind)_

 

* * *

 

 **viii.** **  
** “What will you do now?” Hannibal asks, and Wanda finds herself predicting the particular twists of his accent. She has not yet pinned down its origin, but it is still familiar-unfamiliar and she enjoys hearing it, like the comfort of her brother’s voice, like the voices of home, but not so close as to be a painful reminder.

Wanda shakes her head. “Do not know. For now I will train—”

_(it is easier and easier to train. Despite not talking much of Pietro his loss has become easier to bear with her sessions with Hannibal and now that training is no longer just a distraction she is no longer distracted as she trains._

_She can fly now, when she tries)_

“—but I do not know what I will do after.”

Hannibal’s nod is as slow as ever, a patient and considered movement, as careful as the snake of his mind. “Have you considered aid efforts? There are many who would help your Sokovia, but they do not know the nature of the people there.”

There is a thought behind this suggestion of Hannibal’s—

 _(there always is, some motive that whisks away beyond her scarlet sight, but they always make her_ **_think_ ** _and she cannot search for long)_

—and as ever it gives her pause. “Do you think they want my help?” she asks eventually. “I _caused_ this.”

“Penance,” Hannibal says, “Is a time-honoured tradition.”

 

* * *

 

 **ix.  
** Wanda takes to working in the aid effort. Not always, and not constantly, but she takes days sometimes, goes around the world to Sokovia—

 _(to her_ **_home_ ** _)_

—and encourages people to take the aid packages, points out that they may hate all they like, but death is certain if they do not have warmth in the coming cold of winter.

She cannot do it always. The gaping hole where most of Novi Grad once lay, the shattered buildings and broken streets in other towns and cities remind her all too clearly of the Novi Grad that was her home, of the streets where she and Pietro had run and protested and _lived_. It _aches—_

 _(oh it aches, aches like cold-tensed muscles and legs that have walked all day in search of shelter, an ache down to the bones of herself, to the foundations of her mind and she_ **_can’t_** _, she can’t keep going when this is what it does to her)_

—and more than one time she returns with tears in her eyes. When she goes to Hannibal after helping the people, the snake of his mind seems almost to perk, in that odd quiet way it has, and when it spots her tears its tongue flicks out and _tastes_.

“It hurts you to help them,” Hannibal states, and Wanda nods. “But you will continue to?”

“It is something to do,” she says. “Something Pietro would have wanted to do.”

Hannibal’s smile is soft and curious. “He is still half of you, then, even now.”

Wanda shrugs, feels the shift of the red jacket Natasha had let her keep after the battle over her shoulders. “We are- _were_ twins. Born together, lived together, survived together. We always thought we would die together. We had no one else.”

“Codependency is a dangerous thing,” Hannibal says, but it’s bland and not a warning as it has been from every other psychiatrist-therapist so far. “Even if it is mutual.”

“Perhaps,” Wanda says. “But I would not give it up willingly for the world.”

 

* * *

 

 **x.  
** “Do you care for people?” Hannibal asks one day. “Other than your brother?”

Wanda pauses, considers—

 _(Hannibal’s questions always make her do this, cut through to the heart of the matter, make her pause, make her_ **_think_ ** _about things she had always known before. She had cared, once, for those other than her brother, and that was the main reason Pietro had been so willing to help them – because it made her happy to do. Now…)_

—“I think I do,” she says. “I did once. It is hard with Pietro gone. I cannot care properly; I feel as though I am drifting. I am … not anchored.”

Hannibal nods slowly, eyes catching the red from the curtains the way her eyes catch the spark from her scarlet. She remembers when it had first happened—

 _(Pietro’s words: “Wanda, you look like a witch,” said with a beaming-glad smile and it_ **_aches_ ** _oh it_ **_aches_ ** _)_

—and knows the feel of it in her eyes well, like her pulse but felt through bone, turning the world briefly to greyscale with her scarlet the only colour. She wonders if he knows how his eyes turn maroon in the light, a darker colour than the Vision’s skin by only a few shades, almost as ominous as it is when the scarlet fills her gaze.

“It is not uncommon,” Hannibal says, “To dissociate in the face of trauma. In other cases apathy becomes more common, allowing the traumatised individual to function without feeling so they do not have to focus so entirely on what happened.” He pauses, waves a hand slightly, somehow not dismissively. “Many in Sokovia have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, from living in a warzone all their lives, and this can affect how they handle later traumas.”

Wanda watches the snake of his mind, alert, yes, and watching, but almost tired by his words, the stark colouration of the adder-pattern fading to dullness in boredom at them, even as its eyes remain fixed on Wanda. Wanda has grown to appreciate this focus, snakelike and untrustworthy as it is, because it shows willing, shows interest, proves that, to Hannibal at least, she is not some threatening chore.

She does, on some level, _matter_.

It helps that she can slip into his mind without becoming wholly entangled in it. The knots and coils and adder-patterns of the snake of his mind are hard to navigate, a palace in non-Euclidean space, an Escher painting made solid and three-dimensional, and sometimes she feels the reforming rooms of her mind shifting to match it, but does not mind so terribly. Sometimes she sees vines coiling and growing, thorns digging into the walls like the lace tracery of roots found on climbing ivy, and it reminds her of the forest that had sprung up with the destruction of the cathedral, the synagogue, the simple wooden frame of what had remained before it had all turned to dust.

_(Sometimes she sees scales slithering down corridors, adder-patterned like the snake of Hannibal’s mind, and she wonders if it is safe to use his mind as a model, as a place to hide from her sorrow.)_

“That is all well and good,” Wanda says, eventually. “But how do I _fix_ it?”

 

* * *

 

 **xi.  
** Sometimes she has nightmares still—

_(terrible tearing things, the searing pain as her brother’s mind was torn from hers the blue fading and flickering, his thoughts ripped out of hers where they had intermingled in the bridge between their brains, his blue torn from the purple middle of their conjoined tapestry of thoughts)_

—and she wakes gasping and terrified and _hurting_ , scarlet bright around her hands, in her eyes, flinching back from every bright beacon-mind sleeping around her, distrusting every peaceful open one.

If she stretches, if she searches, she can see the peaceful contented coil of Hannibal’s mind, the snake sleeping peacefully in its nest of thorny branches. Once—

_(only once, she had felt the sleeping shift of his mind, his own nightmares clawing their way up through oubliettes from the deep dark ocean he kept hidden beneath the passages of the snake of his mind)_

—she had ventured towards his mind, felt out the sleeping coil of the serpent of it. The scales, like all serpents, smooth and soft, the black adder-pattern feeling cooler to her stretching scarlet hands. The congealing blood where the snake coiled around the thorny vine-branches of _intrigue_ and _interest_ and **_oh_** _, fascinating_ and she almost wants to fear its intensity, not for her sake but for his, as she had ever feared for Pietro for his intensity.

_(intensity burns, burns people out, burns away concerns and care for all except their focus, and Wanda has never been so painfully aware that she was her brother’s polestar until his ship is no longer there for her to guide)_

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
“Are you ever angry?” Hannibal asks. His voice is soft, his accent clipping words oddly, twisting sounds in that familiar-unfamiliar way she has grown comfortable with. She supposes there is a hidden point behind this question, as there is to every question Hannibal asks, a secondary reason behind the simple one of therapy, but as ever she cannot reason it out—

_(his thoughts are like the snake of his mind, coiling serpents utterly their own in reason and purpose, and for all she has mapped her mind on his she still thinks as she ever has)_

—and has long since given up on trying. It is easier to map the effects of his questions than the reasoning behind them. Wanda thinks, casts her mind back and forwards and around, and tries to think of _anger_ , think _angrily_ , and—

_(cannot. It is not there, the burning anger of her vengeance, the fury that would rise when someone tried to hurt Pietro, the anger at the injustices of Novi Grad. She feels back and back and finds the last burning time as she ripped the core from Ultron’s body._

_there is no anger left now)_

—“I was,” Wanda says. “I do not know anymore.”

Hannibal gestures just slightly, his hand moving away from his body, inviting her to continue. “Tell me about your anger,” he says.

_(Wanda can see the snake of his mind, watching, alert as ever. Its tongue has not yet stretched out to taste but she is almost certain that it will, at some point today, as it ever has when she has talked of the older past)_

“It burns,” she says. “Like fire, but it warms rather than hurts, warms to scalding. It is… a driving force, like Pietro’s purpose.”

“His purpose of protecting you?” Hannibal clarifies, and even as Wanda nods she sees the snake of his mind flicking out its tongue to taste. She wonders if he asked on purpose.

“It drove me towards vengeance, on Stark and then on Ultron for,” she pauses, almost chokes, forces herself on, “for Pietro.”

In his chair Hannibal stretches an arm to one side, a single elegant movement, barely disturbing the precise lines of his suit. He lifts a folder, opens it, flicks through to a page.

“The report filed by the Vision says that you had somehow torn out his core.”

Wanda’s nod is jerky, but clear. She can see the serpent of his mind watching with renewed interest, the blooms of the thorny vines brighter, bigger, in a myriad colours—

_(dark purple, dark red, deep blue, a pale green, orange and crimson and a deep dark black)_

—and sees its focus for all the thorns biting into its adder-patterned skin.

“With your scarlet?” he asks, and Wanda nods again. “He had remade himself with vibranium,” he says. “That is supposed to be almost impossible to damage.”

“I was angrier than it was strong,” Wanda says, and it is a whisper. “He had taken my _brother_ from me.”

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.** **  
** Hannibal, Wanda learns, does not mind not being in control of a situation. Hannibal is more than capable of controlling a situation, if he so wishes, calm statements and questions to guide things to a peaceful resolution – or whatever resolution he prefers – with relative ease.

_(she has seen it sometimes, when outside of sessions, seen him follow the flow of conversation the way a coral snake would a current, finding the simplest path through it to reach his goal, as she had woven her way through crowds to reach the front)_

Other times, however, he will probe with impunity, asking and asking and asking still more, probing points that Wanda wants nothing more than for him to _leave alone_. He is polite—

_(ever so polite, always and unfailingly, and she can see his disgust for rudeness in every coil of the snake of his mind)_

—but he asks on, teasingly, and it does not help that this, this day would have been their _birthday_ , and now she must stand it alone. She feels the pulse of the scarlet in her gaze, sees her scarlet on her hands, sees the grey-brown-black of the adder-pattern of the snake of Hannibal’s mind, sees it stretch out its tongue and _taste_.

“ _Stop_ ,” Wanda says. The scarlet is building behind her eyes, around her hands, it is lashing like angered vipers, like tight-twisted ropes uncoiling, because he is asking and asking and asking on, and suggesting _things_ of she and Pietro that never would have happened, could have happened, because they had chosen against it long before it could have been truly possible.

She shuts her eyes tight, sees his mind, serpent coiled amongst blooming flowers blooming still brighter, sees her scarlet rising from her hands like snakes, and makes her voice firm. “Stop,” she says. “ _Please_. You are better than this.” She can feel the expression Hannibal must be wearing from the particular tilt of the snake of his mind. “Why are you being rude?”

The flowers around the snake of Hannibal’s mind bloom in splendour, bloom in technicolour. “You have used that word before,” he says, and she can hear the smile in it. “Rude.” There is the pause he always gives, considering, patient, calm, and she can hear his breath, feel the brightening pulse of his mind which must match his heartbeat. “Do you know what that word means to me?”

 _(does she know, does she_ **_know?_ ** _She has been in his mind all these months of meetings, flitting in and out without meaning and with, drifting as she does, she knows, knows how rudeness is seen by Hannibal, ever polite as he is, has seen the momentary shifts from interest to dislike with moments of rudeness and the simple acceptance for each apology given in whichever way she chooses._

 _she knows what_ **_rude_ ** _means to Hannibal Lecter)_

“You hate it,” she says, simply. “As much as I did Stark.”

Wanda does not need to open her eyes to see the smile that Hannibal gives. Thin-lipped, the smile of a serpent, but a true smile, glinting maroon in his eyes.

She has found the core tenet of Hannibal Lecter’s mind, even as he has learned all of hers.

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Wanda can feel her mind changing, warping within the shape she had been making for it. Oh she had been changing it herself—

_(long coiling corridors of a library, avenue after avenue of books and memories, artefacts and secrets, photos of Pietro and of their parents, of the synagogue they had gone to as children, of the cats in the street, twisting around each other, coiling into each other, a library in non-Euclidean space, an Escher painting made solid and three-dimensional)_

—but not like this, not so serpentine as _this_.

Sometimes she fears what will come of it.

 

* * *

 

 **xv.** **  
** “Will,” Hannibal says, and it is with that eerie familiarity that Will wishes he would not use. He cannot help the ease with which he knows people, instinctive understanding gleaned from the emotions wafting off them like perfume or cologne, but Hannibal can and Hannibal knows, from several conversations, that Will does not like the familiarity he expresses. They are _not_ familiar. They are _not_ friends. Hannibal’s ability to mimic Will’s own behaviours – while once appreciated for preventing Will’s own mimicry in turn – had sent his mind spiralling down coiling paths and into thorny territory.

He did not like being in the presence of Dr. Lecter’s mind, his precisely swirling emotions, his flat-eyed face so snakelike in a human skin. He does not like that - of all the psychiatrists and therapists in their employ - Hannibal has been the only one able to even vaguely get through to Wanda Maximoff—

_(ashes and smoke – petrol smoke not wood – something burning still in the distance, sootily, the crisp copper of blood, a bitter hint of adrenaline. She was loss and anger and a bone-deep grief, and the scents of her emotions sang out more strongly than any of the Avengers when they had arrived._

_Will wondered if that was because of her telepathy, her neural interface, or if she truly felt so strongly)_

—the grieving girl with so much to grieve.

“It is for my patient,” Hannibal says. Begrudgingly, Will glances at the man around the frames of his glasses. “Wanda Maximoff still grieves,” he says. “I do not think she will ever stop; her brother was a part not just of her life but of her very self.”

“Well,” Will says, and shifts a pile of folders on his desk. “They were twins.”

There is a slight twist to the thin lines of Hannibal’s lips and Will thinks it might almost be a smile given the scent of fresh cut grass and flowers, and the slightest hint of bergamot: the scents of a rival acknowledged as worthy. “Indeed,” Hannibal says. “I believe that, with the Cradles and whatever might remain of any projects we have, we should attempt to reawaken Pietro Maximoff’s body.”

Will goes still. Hannibal should not know this, not be aware of this, not know how, as soon as the lifeboat had reached the Helicarrier Pietro’s body had been hauled to medical, put through every procedure they had been able to think of to try to prevent any decay, to maintain him in limbo between life and death for as long as they might, until they could bring him back.

Hannibal _should not know_.

“Will,” Hannibal says, and his voice is almost reproving. Around him Will can smell sunlight and warm summer winds, and the heat haze rising off tarmac—

_(parental condescension)_

—“Of course I know. I have higher clearance than many, and I needed to know this to better treat Miss Maximoff.”

Will’s expression does not change.

“Please,” Hannibal says. “This would help Wanda immeasurably.” In the air around him is the scent of fresh-turned soil, of engine grease, and car oil—

_(efficient certainty)_

—and Will considers. He remembers the changing scent of Wanda Maximoff, the grief still present but now mingled with the scent of burning hair and bone and peat—

_(soul-crushing loss and continued pain)_

—and so:

“I’ll talk to Fury,” he says eventually.

 

* * *

 

 **xvi.** **  
** There is a secret in Hannibal’s mind when they next talk. Wanda can feel it. It’s tucked in amongst the coils of the snake of his mind, between biting brambles, the blooming flowers, the adder-patterned skin, and Wanda remembers that adders are venomous.

It will do no good to probe.

 

* * *

 

 **xvii.**  
“What would you do,” Hannibal asks one day, his voice terribly soft. “To see your brother brought back to you?”

Wanda does not have to think—

_(the thought, the answer is like lightning like her brother’s speed but in her bright scarlet, certain and undeniable)_

—to know how she will answer this. Were it this day, were it weeks ago, were it when they were trapped apart in the castle, the answer would ever be the same.

“Anything,” she says. “Anything at all.”

 

* * *

 

 **xviii.**  
Wanda can feel her mind twisting, twisting like a snake or … it is more like an eel she thinks, in water, rising elegantly up from its cavern of her mind. It seeks out the caverns of other minds, seeks out their secrets.

_—(creepy eyes)—_

_—(too much to analyse, need more people)—_

_—(almost there,_ **_almost_ ** _back with us)—_

_—(data inconclusive; send off for more studies)—_

_—(heartbeat, pulse normal)—_

_—(Banner; it’s his gamma signs: send off to Romanoff)—_

_—(flowers are pretty today)—_

_—(God, I miss flying)—_

_—(his brain signs are_ **_fading_** _, we need some way to keep him here!)—_

There are so many minds to sift through, sort through, to spot and study and steal into and from.

 

* * *

 

 **xix.**  
“Have you ever killed someone?” Hannibal asks.

Wanda considers. She knows, now, how to make her eyes like his, like a snake’s, flat and watchful and inscrutable. She considers in the safety of the maze of her mind.

“Yes,” she says.

“Ultron,” Hannibal says, “Does not count.”

Wanda watches him, snake eyes to snake eyes. “I have killed people,” she says.

Across from her, Hannibal's mouth twitches, almost into a smile. His head tilts, his eyes flash—

_(maroon)_

—in the light from the windows. “Guilt,” he says, “also does not count.”

Wanda watches him, scarlet-glowing eyes watching his maroon. “I have killed people,” she says, and she is certain.

 

* * *

 

 **xx.**  
She feels it, more than knows it, when she next goes to a session with Hannibal. It hovers in his mind, just within her reach, and it is oh so easy to just reach out and _take_ it.

Wanda reaches out. Wanda _takes_.

_(there is a cell, a cell deep below the building, or maybe it is not a cell, maybe it is a lab or a hospital room, it is hard to be sure, but what she is sure of is who is there_

_Pietro is there)_

“Pietro,” Wanda breathes.

“Come,” Hannibal says, rising, buttoning up his suit jacket. “I will show you where they are treating him.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxi.** **  
** The room is dark. The room is dark like Doctor Cho’s lab in Seoul. The room is dark like Doctor Cho’s lab in Seoul and there is a _Cradle_ there, bearing her brother's body within its metal shell.

Wanda knows it is Pietro. She can _feel_ him, the shape of his body, the sense of his sleeping mind. It is as familiar to her as the church where they had sheltered from the streets, as her powers are to her, as _he_ is to her, by virtue of being her twin.

They are halves of a whole, and around Wanda the world begins to coalesce back into sense.

“Pietro,” she breathes, her fingers tapping a scarlet dance over the metal of the Cradle. _Let me in_ , she thinks, and slips within his sleeping—

_(blue, bright and vibrant, silver lacing through and grey, all the colours of her brother's mind, her brother's soul, her brother's very self)_

—mind.

“We will be waking him soon,” says one of the medics buzzing around the Cradle. “Will you want to be present?”

Wanda gives him a _Look_ —

 _(this is her twin, her_ **_twin_** _, half her very_ **_soul_ ** _in that Cradle. How can she not long to be there to witness his return, to feel his mind live and waking against her own?)_

—and is pointed to the stack of chairs in one corner of the room.

“Hannibal,” she says and her voice is soft. “Will you sit with me?”

 

* * *

 

 **xxii.**  
She feels when he is awake. Before even the medics shouts, the sounds of the Cradle opening she can feel the lightning and the wind of the storm of her brother’s mind, swirling in bright intensity around the tree at the core of his mind.

 

* * *

 

 **xxiii.**  
In the Cradle Pietro _breathes_. He had not expected to breathe again. He remembers—

_(bullets, breathing an agony, Wanda screaming, in his mind great waves of scarlet grief trying to hold him back from the jaws of death, the knowledge he had saved two lives and then the world, pale and broken, fading from his sight)_

—what happened. He does not know how long it has been, how Wanda is, but he can feel her mind, crimson at the brink of his, waiting to be welcomed in.

 _Wanda_ , he thinks, and welcomes the bloody flood.

 

* * *

 

 **xxiv.**  
_This is Wanda_ , he reminds himself, in the small breezes that chase amongst the highest branches of his tree. Wanda does not listen here, she never has. This is his private space to say and solve mysteries on his own, problems that do not need Wanda’s input, or will do Wanda no harm.

_(this will do Wanda harm, he knows, but only if she learns he is thinking it)_

Her mind is changed, a warping, twisting non-Euclidean serpent, and Pietro can find no trace of his sister there but her memories.

 

* * *

 

 **xxv.** **  
** “I do not know you,” Pietro says, and there is honesty in his eyes, shining blue and bright and true, and Wanda feels _pain_ , pain to the core of herself, that her own twin, half of herself, does not recognise her. “You are not my sister,” he says. “I do not know who you are anymore.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxvi.**  
_He does not know me_ , Wanda thinks, and then _But he has always known me_. Constants and contradictions, and her mind is more an Escher painting than ever, nonsensical twists and turns making the upright upside-down, making north into south, making left into a great gaping void.

“Wanda,” Hannibal says. Wanda can see the serpent of his mind stretch out it’s tongue and _taste_. “Talk to me,” he says, and his voice, with all its strange familiar-unfamiliar accents is gentle. “Tell me, what is the matter?”

Wanda finds the words and lets out the aching pain of being only half.

 

* * *

 

 **xxvii.** **  
** _You did this_ , Pietro thinks. His mind is fixed on the floating image of Lecter. It hovers in the waves of winds, stronger than they have ever been, which keep his mind apart from Wanda’s. He can feel her still, he _knows_ her, just as she knows him, but not like this, not like this. This is Wanda remade and remade _wrong_ , as he might have been.

 _(he knows he was remade_ **_right_** _, for Wanda would not have neared him if he had been other than he ever was)_

 _Lecter_ , Pietro thinks. He knows how fast he can go when his bond to Wanda is as tenuous as this ( _fast_ , he thinks, _fast enough to vaporise flesh not my own_ ). He knows how strong he can be, how much force he can bring to bear.

_(he considers beating Hannibal Lecter into naught but a bloody pulp, but speed… speed is cleaner. Speed it is)_

He waits until he knows the whole base is sleeping. Sees Wanda in her bed curled small and hunched in on herself. Sees each of the others, even Vision who has been oddly kind, tucked away into their own rooms, sees door after door locked and bolted.

Pietro sprints to the room of Hannibal Lecter at speeds no one can see.

 

* * *

 

 **xxviii.**  
_You did this,_ he thinks as he runs, as he can see the force of the air hitting Lecter. _You did this to her, you reshaped her and warped her and made her_ **_wrong_** _. Wanda would never be like this without you. Wanda is not a snake or an archive, she is_ **_Wanda_** _._

In his hands Doctor Hannibal Lecter becomes nothing but blood and vaporising dust.

 

* * *

 

 **xxix.** **  
** “He was hurting you,” Pietro says, his hands as red as Wanda’s. There is blood on his face too, and his feet and most of his body. His eyes are silver and unrepentant, unforgiving.

“He was _helping_ me,” Wanda says, and it is a whisper.

Pietro breathes out. Pietro breathes in.

“Was he?” he asks. “Or is that what he wanted you to think? What he thought he was doing?”

Wanda has nothing to offer to that.

 

* * *

 

 **xxx.** **  
** In his cell Pietro is quiet. All his stress, his worry for Wanda is quieted, the winds around his mind strong as ever but not so fast. He does not feel like racing now, going so fast he could pulverise a human into gobbets and globules. He rests his head back against the wall, feels out the slender thread Wanda has left between their minds.

 _We are still twins_ , he thinks. _We are that, yet_.

The thread is silent. Pietro’s mind waits.

Wanda right now will hate him. That he knows there is no question of it. He had killed her therapist, someone who had, in some ways, been helping. Someone who she had thought had cared, on some level.

 _No one truly cares, Wanda_ , he remembers saying, long, long ago. _They always have ulterior motives._ He suspects that, now, there is one exception in the form of the Vision, who seems to care for everyone regardless. There has always been the exception of one another, caring for one another as their own souls.

Lecter though, Lecter. Lecter, Pietro thinks, was like Ultron. Fascinated, perhaps, interested and curious about they themselves, but not by any means caring.

 _A snake_ , Pietro thinks, _coiling in the garden._

 

* * *

 

 **xxxi.** **  
** “Why?” A voice asks, and Pietro blinks to see the archer there.

“Lecter?” Pietro asks. “Because he was hurting Wanda,” he says, when the archer has nodded.

“He was treating her,” the archer says, and it sounds as though he’s trying to correct him.

Pietro sighs, tilts his head back against the wall. He does not expect them to quite understand, and he will not explain if they think they are right and know what happened. It seems that, in the end, his ability to hide from Wanda the extent of his dedication to her wellbeing was altogether too good.

“I know my sister,” Pietro says instead. “He was hurting her.”

The archer sits. “No,” Clint says. “He was _treating_ her. Helping her overcome her grief meant he also had to treat the codependency you share.”

Pietro shakes his head. “That is not what he was treating.”

“How do you know?” Clint asks. “Your codependency was hurting her. And now you’re back, maybe the fact you’re still codependent where she isn’t is hurting you both”

Pietro surges forwards, his fists strike the table. “ _Wanda still relies on me_ ,” he hisses. _“That is why it hurts her that she has changed into someone_ **_I do not recognise!”_ **

Clint watches him in silence.

“You do not understand,” Pietro says, shaking his head. “You never will.” He tilts his head back against the wall, and closes his eyes.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxii.** **  
** The next time someone speaks it is an entirely strange voice. Pietro looks up to see a bespectacled man who seems to be trying very hard to avoid eye contact.

“I know why you killed Hannibal,” he says, and Pietro’s interest is piqued.

The man is quiet, avoiding eyes still, glancing to him around the frames of his glasses. “Hannibal was… human, but not quite. A snake in human skin, creeping through the world.”

“A snake in the garden,” Pietro says, and the man nods, smiles.

“Precisely.” They are watching each other now. The man is refusing to make eye contact, but is still watching him, observing, and Pietro watches where the man’s eyes dart. “What was he doing to your sister?”

Pietro shrugs. “Do not know his aims.” The man watches still. “Her mind was becoming like a snake. It used to be a cathedral. Before that, a synagogue.”

The man’s head tilts back, throat exposed, a nod of trust. “He was trying to make her like him.” It is Pietro’s turn to watch. The man’s hands twitch at his side. “He tried to do that to me. Broken people with powers fascinate him. Power and chaos.”

“Wanda angered is chaos,” Pietro says, and it is a whisper.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxiii.**  
“Pietro,” Wanda says, and he is alert in an instant. His eyes fix on her face, check her for tiredness or injury or illness, and he only relaxes when he assured that she is none of these things.

“Sister,” he says in Sokovian.

He sees then, sees something relax in Wanda as he says it, and is beside her in a moment, guiding her to a seat.

He sits opposite her, two sides of two opposing fronts. His hands are open and empty on the table in front of him.

“Why?” Wanda asks, and opens the bond between their minds.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxiv.**  
Reasons flood into Wanda’s mind, bright and crisp and blue, and wash out the books of her library, the pictures and statues depicting memories, lift them up on a great tide of sky and water and wind without any of them getting wet.

 _We think like this_ , Pietro’s mind reminds her, and the walls of her coiling library shake and shatter and the underlying synagogue breaks free. She can feel his mind sigh. _He was making you like him. You weren’t like_ **_you_ ** _._

Her eyes are shut, focussed on this world within their minds, but her hands stretch out, fingers find Pietro’s open ones and hold them as tight as life.

 _You should have_ **_told_ ** _me-_

 _-could not have_ **_known-_ **

**_-we_ ** _should have killed him-_

_-you would not have wanted to-_

_-I would have-_

_-you shouldn’t have had to-_

_-don’t need you to protect me-_

_-_ **_Protect_ ** _._

It’s an echoing thought between their minds, the root of all their codependency. Pietro’s thumb runs soothingly over Wanda’s hands.

“I will always protect you,” he murmurs in Sokovian. “It’s _my_ job,” he finishes in English.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the odd right/left alignments for the bracketed thoughts is intentional, especially in how it applies to Wanda and Pietro's thoughts.
> 
> Comments and Kudos are much appreciated.


End file.
